Chemical aids on the battlefield

Elite soldiers are now using physical, technological and pharmaceutical means to excel on the battlefield. The idea of a machine-enhanced 'Robocop' or a pharmaceutically-enhanced 'Jason Bourne' is no longer the realm of science fiction.

Dr Rain Liivoja (above), Project Director for the Law of Armed Conflict at the Asia Pacific Centre for Military Law at the Melbourne Law School, says that after the robotics revolution of the past decade, biology and neuroscience is the next frontier for the military. 

He says increasingly, armed forces are experimenting with, or routinely using performance enhancing drugs or other chemical, biological or technological enhancements to give them an edge against their enemies.

“For example, the US Air Force has been experimenting with pharmaceuticals that promote wakefulness for prolonging the capacity of fighter pilots,” Dr Liivoja says.

The military is also experimenting with brain-machine interfaces. 

"One could use the human brain to directly control vehicles or weapons systems, or vehicles that have been combined with weapons systems, and to rely, not on manual controls, but on an interface that picks up the electrical signals from the brain and converts them into commands," he says.

Dr Liivoja wants to understand the legal and ethical implications of these new kinds of military technologies.

“There is a lot of stuff happening in terms of optimising or enhancing human performance or combining the best features of human performance with the best features of technology,” he says.

“And, as always, ethics and law are trying to catch up, trying to keep up with the technological developments, trying to predict the social problems and trying to forecast what the legal solutions would be to those social problems.”

For example, drugs that can dampen memory are being considered for treatment of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). But this could have unintended outcomes.

“If we give soldiers these kinds of drugs after they’ve encountered a particularly traumatic battlefield experience then that has implications for judicial processes, should we want to investigate whether their conduct on the battlefield was proper,” Dr Liivoja says. 

“There will be significant consequences for war crimes investigations if we use agents to reduce the ability of the soldiers to remember what happened.”

Dr Liivoja was recently awarded a highly competitive Branco Weiss Fellowship from the Society in Science program at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich to explore the regulatory challenges which emerge from the increasing militarisation of neurosciences and other biosciences. 

Unusually, this five-year fellowship allows the awardee to work at any institution. Dr Liivoja says he chose to do his fellowship at the University of Melbourne because of the “wonderful” international law community, and to continue his collaboration with Melbourne Law School academics Professor Tim McCormack and Associate Professor Bob Mathews.

The US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is the world’s biggest funder of this kind of research. Surprisingly, Dr Liivoja says this organisation is not as secretive as one might think, and the primary research into these technologies is often published in freely accessible scientific journals.

“It’s very difficult, however, to say what the exact military applications of this scientific knowledge will be,” Dr Liivoja says.

“And we don’t really know what technologies can be weaponised. But it’s important to think about the possibilities before they are.”

www.law.unimelb.edu.au